What else?!

Source: Cosmopolitan.com

USA – We’ve reached peak goon. Which is to say, “gooning” has just been named the Fetish of the Year by Clips4Sale, the leading platform for kink content. Citing a 151 percent increase in sales for gooning content since 2023, including a 49 percent jump in the last six months alone, the site has identified gooning as the fastest-growing trend in kink. Meanwhile, Google Trends data also reveals a steep increase in gooning-related searches over the last year, confirming that while Clips4Sale has technically crowned gooning their 2026 Fetish of the Year, 2025 was really the year this once ultra-niche kink officially went mainstream

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I may be biased, but I like to think that we here at Cosmo may have played some small role in cementing gooning’s icon status this year—thanks, interestingly enough, to Chase Sui Wonders. The star recommended “gooning on the first date” in her Cosmo Quiz for our Summer Issue, resulting in a spirited editorial debate here at Cosmo HQ and one of the most wonderfully unhinged Cosmopolitan coverlines in recent memory.

But if this is the first you’re hearing of gooning, you may have some questions. Namely, what is it? As I’ve explored at length elsewhere, that’s a seemingly simple question with no simple answer. But in its most basic form, gooning refers to the act of prolonged masturbation without reaching orgasm, often for hours on end and usually involving extensive porn consumption.

“Gooners enter a trancelike state—referred to as the ‘goon state’—from being so close to climax and then pulling back right before they cum,” sex expert Zachary Zane previously told Cosmopolitan. The goon state—and the pursuit of it that is gooning—is often associated with mindlessness and porn-addled brain rot, the name “gooning” itself literally coming from the term “goon,” meaning stupid person. However, other gooners argue that gooning is not a mindless practice but a meditative one that’s more about achieving a transcendent state than stroking yourself into a subhman one.

Either way, the practice has its origins in a niche and very online gooning community, which remained virtually unknown to those outside it until just a few years ago. While the earliest known use of the term online dates back to a 2005 Urban Dictionary entry, gooning is thought to have started gaining traction around 2019, with the formation of the r/Gooned subreddit. Kink content creator Mistress Buddah attributes gooning’s subsequent rise in popularity to the pandemic. “Porn watchers had a lot of alone time on their hands and became sexually frustrated,” she explains, adding that this was when she first began to receive requests for this category.

Since then, gooning has exploded in popularity. The term began to enter a level of public consciousness around 2022, when it first started making its way out of the gooncave and into explainers from mainstream media publications. Flash-forward to today, and gooning is essentially a household name. In addition to the practice and community itself continuing to expand, gooning has also entered the zeitgeist as meme fodder, functioning as something of a slang term on social media that is mostly embraced, as far as I can tell, for its sheer silliness.

How did we get here? Honestly, the world may never know. But if you’re looking for more info on gooning, check out our full explainer. Meanwhile, congrats to all the gooners out there, and Happy Goon Year to all who celebrate.